Tatooine-like Planet Discovered 403
ATP writes "CNN is reporting that a planet has been discovered in a solar system with 3 suns. The observation brings into doubt the theory stating that planets form from the dust orbiting around a single sun. The discovery also resulted in a new method of searching for extrasolar planets-- until now most searching focused only on single-sun systems."
Tatooine has 2 suns... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.google.com/search?q=tatooine+suns [google.com]
Not really Tatooine-like... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Tatooine has 2 suns... (Score:1, Informative)
Episode: 1ACV07 - My Three Suns [gotfuturama.com]
not like Tatooine... (Score:4, Informative)
The planet, a gas giant slightly larger than Jupiter, orbits the main star of a triple-star system known as HD 188753 in the constellation Cygnus.
Unless I missed something major when watching the movies, Tatooine isn't a gas giant...
Re:More changes for next release of star wars... (Score:3, Informative)
No 3rd sun in that system, according to that source.
Re:Like Tatooine? (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, no. (Score:5, Informative)
With the exception of the one rock planet observed, ALL are gas giants and virtually all many times larger than all the Gas Giants in our own solar system combined. We are NOT talking something the size of Venus, here, we are talking something closer in size to our own sun. This does make a bit of a difference.
To directly observe a planet the size of Earth at a resolution of 1 pixel at a distance of 100 light-years would require a radio telescope with a 1 Km diameter. The proposed Km radio telescope array would do this. Nobody has such a telescope (yet) so nobody is making this sort of claim (yet). But it could be done, it has been designed and (last I heard) it was being built. Once it is finished, planetary discoveries will be made much more rapidly and much more reliably.
It is unlikely to happen in my lifetime, but such an array, in space, would be able to scan a lot of absorbtion frequencies, allowing you to not only detect such a planet, but know the composition of the atmosphere as well. A 1 mile diameter array in space would give you 6.25 pixels-worth of data - certainly enough to detect the existance of weather patterns and possibly enough to detect large moons (provided they are radio objects).
Re:Uhh... (Score:5, Informative)
As for the system being thrown together after forming seperately, that's highly unlikely. First of all, space is mostly... well, space. The chances against two star systems colliding at all, nevermind doing so in a way that forms a stable three-star system are, no pun intended, astronomical. Even if a stable three-star configuration formed, it's even more likely that the sudden change in orbital dynamics would promptly eject the planet from the system (not hard to do--actually, if memory serves me, Mercury is in the process of being very slowly ejected from our own solar system. The sun will probably die first, though).
So, yes, lots of things could have happened... most of them probably even more fantastically implausible than the system forming as-is.
Nightfall, the movie (late 1980's) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Like Tatooine? (Score:4, Informative)
More info here [security-forums.com].
From reading that, I'm guessing the page just has a really long perl filename accessed from, perhaps, the ad script or similar.
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:3, Informative)
More information from Nasa (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:3, Informative)
Our earth-moon system is very imbalanced (which is thought to be a result form a collision with an external body), so it should be rare.
about the second one: i dont think we know enough about how intelligent life starts to make ANY kind of guess here, but i dont see how a moon should be required for the basic evolution... The only point thinkable were that tides helped in the primordial phase, but its not like we wouldnt have tides without the moon, the sun alone would be good enough for small ones, too.
Well, the third point: You can have an eclipse
Re:No (Score:1, Informative)